Your mother called you something sweet once
AO3 Link
Summary: Hawks finds a body buried in the woods.
Notes: Written for the CTABB server Halloween minibang. I was paired with @paigeypaigey I’m also counting it for @villainmonth Day 31: Horror.
My ko-fi
We came into this life with nothing
And all we’re taking is a name
That’s why I’ve written you this song
This is for Fulton County Jane
The whole world’s gone crazy
And there’s only God to blame
Your mother called you something sweet once, darling
You’re more than Fulton County Jane
(Fulton County Jane Doe by Brandi Carlile)
Hawks pulled his wings tight against his back and hunkered down to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible. All of his focus was on the single feather loosely attached to Dabi’s coat. Tracking someone this way was difficult, it took Hawks many years to master this technique, but there was really no other way to track Dabi through a wooded area at night without giving himself away. His giant, bright red wings were good for publicity, not stealth.
Earlier that night, Hawks had caught sight of Dabi entering Endor Forest Park when he was heading home after the end of his patrol. Why would a lone, high ranking member of the Paranormal Liberation Front be skulking around in Endor Park? It was so far away from Deika. (Not that distance mattered to the Front. They had multiple warp Quirks at their disposal now.)
On instinct, Hawks had dropped down to follow Dabi into the forest. He sent out a single feather to attach to Dabi’s coat and trailed behind him as close as he dared. The path Dabi walked was almost completely overgrown. If Hawks had not been following Dabi, he never would have noticed it was there.
They continued on, deeper and deeper into the woods. As soon as Hawks determined that Dabi was far away enough that he wouldn’t notice him, he would dart down the path and hide once more, still out of Dabi’s line of sight.
Abruptly, Dabi stopped, and did not start again.
A few minutes passed, and Hawks crept closer. He used his feathers and years of training to silently slip between the trees and through the foliage. He detached two feathers and used them to lift himself up into the branches of a tree so he could get a clear view of Dabi. (There was a bird joke there, he knew, but he was too tense to think of one.)
Dabi crouched, unmoving, in a small clearing. Thin, weak rays of moonlight illuminated him. His hand rested on a mound of dirt, his head bowed. He stayed there, completely still, for at least five minutes. Hawks’ legs began to cramp, but he ignored the feeling.
Without warning, Dabi stood, turned, and looked up at Hawks, meeting his eyes with a macabre smile.
Fuck.
Hawks ducked behind the trunk of the tree he was hiding in. His heart pounded in his chest, and he could feel his pulse racing in his throat. Dabi definitely saw him. Hawks took a deep breath. There was no helping it now. He dropped down out of the tree to face Dabi.
But he was gone. Hawks stared stupidly at the single feather he had attached to Dabi’s jacket as it slowly drifted to the ground. There was nowhere for Dabi to go, and the only sounds were that of crickets and and the wind blowing through the leaves. Where the hell was he?
Hawks approached the spot where Dabi had been crouching and kneeled. He brushed his fingers over the dirt. What could be so important that Dabi would come all this way?
As if compelled, Hawks pulled a feather from his wing and began to dig. He dug and dug, the water in the ground seeping into his pants. When the feather finally broke, he discarded it and detached another. He kept on digging, ruining three more feathers.
When he was shivering uncontrollably from the cold and his fingernails were ragged and dirty, his feather hit something plastic. He paused for a moment, stunned that he had actually found something, then carefully cleared the dirt around the object. Bit by bit it emerged from the ground until it became clear what it was—a black garbage bag. With shaking hands, Hawks tore the bag open to find a clump of dirty red hair and a skull.
Usually, Hawks’ role in a murder case ended with him catching the villain and filling out paperwork. After that he wasn’t involved at all. He couldn’t tell you what happened after any of those murders were taken over by the police. In those cases, the murder was fresh, the identity of the victim and perpetrator known. He was a pro hero. He dealt with villain attacks and the occasional natural disaster, not cold cases.
Who were you? he thought as the detectives processed the scene.
What happened to you? he thought as the police took his statement. How did you get here? How long have you been here?
Do you have a family? Are they waiting for you to come home? Did they move on?
Hawks knew about John Does and Jane Does. He knew about things like bodies never identified, cases never solved, murderers never caught, going on with their lives as if they hadn’t ended someone else’s. He knew about these things, but he never thought about them. It wasn’t relevant to him. He never thought about families whose loved ones never came home. Who attended a John Doe’s funeral? How were they buried? What was written on their grave?
It occurred to Hawks for the first time that anyone could have done this. He could have looked this person’s murderer straight in the eyes and never known. It was absurd, he knew. There were too many people in this area of Japan, and they could have moved away by now. On top of that, who knew how long this body had been there? The murderer could be dead themselves, or locked away for killing someone else.
The news broke the next day. The commission made sure Hawks’ name was kept out of it. It would be a nightmare for the public to wonder why the number two hero was following the villain Dabi through the dark woods instead of, you know, arresting him. There was a commotion, but not a big one. Not as big as Hawks was expecting. There was a person killed and dumped in a shallow grave like they meant nothing, and people just gossiped and tutted and then went on to talk about the most recent episode of their favorite shows.
They called him Endor Park John Doe.
Hawks should have been ashamed of using his connections to gain access to the investigation. He should have been, but he wasn’t.
“Now, if you look here,” the forensic pathologist said to Hawks, running his finger down a line on the skull, “these are called the cranial sutures. They are the seams of your skull, so to speak. When you are a newborn, they are completely open to facilitate childbirth, but the older you get, the more they close. They begin to fuse completely when you are around thirty, and these-” He tapped the skull. “-are not fused.”
“So he was under thirty?” Hawks asked. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the skull.
“Definitely. More telling is this.” The pathologist turned the skull onto its side and pointed at a tooth. “This is a wisdom tooth, and it hasn’t come in yet.”
Hawks stared blankly at the tooth. “...and that means?”
“Wisdom teeth come in in your early twenties, which means that, based on the size of the skeleton, this person was somewhere between thirteen and twenty three or so. If I had to guess, I’d put him between fifteen and seventeen. During adolescence, each of your major arm bones and leg bones finish growing at different times. This young man’s humerus has fused and is done growing-” The pathologist touched one of the bones on the table. “-but his radius has not.”
So he was a teenager, probably still in high school, when he died. Were his friends worried when he stopped coming to class? Did his parents think he ran away?
“Do you have a cause of death yet?”
“Unfortunately not.” The pathologist carefully set the skull down on the table with the rest of the bones and took off his latex gloves. “There are no knife marks on any of the bones. The soft tissue is too degraded for most toxicology tests. His clothes are scorched, but his bones show no sign of fire damage, so he may have died of smoke inhalation. Without the lungs, we’ll never know. There is one important thing, though.” His face was somber. “Many of his bones are fractured, some of them quite badly.”
“He was beaten to death?”
“Perhaps. There isn’t any trauma serious enough to cause death by itself, but it’s possible that he sustained internal injuries and bled to death. And...” He hesitated. “There are even more fractures in various stages of healing. Far more than the average boy his age.”
“Abuse?” Hawks said. Could he have been murdered by a member of his family?
“Possibly. He could have been a student at a hero school, as well. They get quite rowdy, especially those at UA.”
Not likely. Students at hero schools had gone missing before, of course, but the school usually made a big commotion out of it. Hawks’ mind was stuck on the image of a faceless man or woman beating their teenage son to death. Or, maybe he ran away because of the abuse and met a grisly end on the streets. It wasn’t a pretty picture from any angle.
“We’re still no closer to identifying the body,” the pathologist said, shaking Hawks out of his thoughts. “I can’t pinpoint when he died. It has to have been a few years, at least. He doesn’t have any identifying items on him, and his clothes are generic. The brand of the trash bag he was wrapped in was discontinued five years ago, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have any lying around somewhere.”
“What about DNA?” Hawks hadn’t seen many crime dramas, but everything always seemed to revolve around DNA.
The pathologist grimaced. “The body is too badly degraded. I tried pulling some pulp out of the teeth-” (Hawks winced at the thought of teeth pulp being pulled out.) “-but I couldn’t get enough from that either. It’s useless without anything to compare it to, anyway. If our John Doe here isn’t in any database, we’re out of luck. We called in a forensic artist, and she’ll be here in a couple of days. Hopefully we’ll have a face by the end of the week.”
“You led me to that body on purpose, didn’t you?”
Dabi slowly turned his head to look at Hawks. He ran his tongue over his teeth and tilted his head as if contemplating the question. “What do you think?”
Hawks thought- he thought- he didn’t know what he thought. He’d slept so little the past few nights, his mind swirling. Why had Dabi gone into that forest that night? Did he go there frequently? Had nobody ever noticed before?
Logically, Dabi must have known that a body was buried there, otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped at that exact spot. The most likely conclusion was that he was the murderer, visiting the unmarked grave of his victim, either to gloat or out of remorse. That was certainly what the commission (and the police) thought. But it didn’t sit right with Hawks.
Dabi had to have known Hawks had been following him that night. He looked straight at Hawks, with no hesitation or surprise.
“...Did you kill him?” Hawks asked, not believing it even as he said it.
“No.”
The silence rung in Hawks’ ears.
“Do you know who he is?”
Dabi grinned, a lopsided, gruesome thing that pulled against his staples, and said nothing.
Hawks didn’t get much sleep that night, either. Disjointed fragments of thoughts crashed into each other in his already muddled mind. How did Dabi know Endor Park John Doe? Were they friends? Relatives? Did he witness the murder?
In the back of his mind another possibility stirred, but he ignored it.
“Facial reconstruction is part science, part art,” the forensic artist said. “You can only get so much from a skull. The soft tissue and skin is lost, so you must give it your best guess.”
She turned the bust so Hawks could get a better look. It was crude and finely carved at the same time. Features were smoothed out, but the sculptor’s skill was indisputable.
The artist tugged on a red wig, the same color as the clump of hair found in the bag with the corpse. Recognition twinged inside Hawks.
“He looks familiar,” he said.
The artist and the detective looked at him sharply. “You know who he is?” she asked.
Hawks shook his head. “It’s just a feeling. I can’t place it.”
The detective hummed doubtfully. “Let us know if you remember anything. Either way, we’ll get this out on the evening news tonight. With any luck, someone will recognize the face. I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though; cold case John Does tend to sit for a long time before they’re identified, if they ever are.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky?” Hawks couldn’t imagine never knowing. It would eat at him for the rest of his life.
“Maybe.”
Less than a month later, Todoroki Fuyumi came into the station with tears in her eyes and a picture of her brother clutched in her hand.
Endor Park John Doe had a name and it was Todoroki Touya. Twin brother of Todoroki Fuyumi and oldest child of Pro-Hero Endeavor. He was sixteen years old the last time anyone had seen him, six years ago. Six years to the day that Hawks followed Dabi into the woods and found Touya’s body. According to Endeavor, Touya stormed off after a fight and he never saw him again. He was never reported missing.
This time, it was a complete media circus. Nobody seemed to care much about a nameless, faceless, murdered child found in a shallow grave in the woods, or, if they did care, it was at a distance. But the number one hero’s son found brutally murdered? Now that was a story.
Hawks stared numbly at the television screen, the remote dangling from his fingers, as the news showed the same photos of Touya over and over. He stared at the slope of Touya’s nose, the shape of his face, the color of his eyes. He heard sixteen year old Touya crack a joke at his sister’s expense on a home video the news got their hands on.
Touya had a fire quirk. His flames were so hot they burned blue.
Hawks thought a lot that night about how Dabi was literally stapled together. About how Dabi had survived hits that he shouldn’t have. How Hawks had never seen Dabi eat or sleep.
Dabi had a fire quirk.
“I wanted to thank you for bringing Touya back home to us,” Fuyumi said.
Hawks couldn’t say anything for a second. He stared at Fuyumi. “But I didn’t bring him back? He’s...” He made a weak gesture towards the coffin.
He couldn’t help feeling like he had failed Touya and the Todorokis despite that fact that Touya had died when Hawks was still a teenager himself.
Fuyumi shook her head. “I meant you brought us closure. We- we have a body to bury. Thank you.” Tears started to well up in her eyes.
Oh shit. Oh shit. Hawks couldn’t handle this. It was too much. He cast about the room, desperate to find a way out of this situation.
“I’m sorry,” Fuyumi said, wiping the tears away. “I shouldn’t burden you...”
“No- no! You’re fine! I-”
Shouting from the other side of the room interrupted them.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”
Fuyumi and Hawks whipped their heads toward the source of the shouting. Natsuo and Endeavor stood across from each other, squared off. Natsuo clenched his fists and glared up at Endeavor. It was the second time Hawks had seen Endeavor in anything other than his hero costume and without his fire. The effect was still jarring. He looked like an entirely different person.
“Touya was my son. It would look bad-”
“Oh! It would look bad!” Natsuo laughed, a hysterical, almost cruel edge to it. “Of course. You have to at least pretend to act like you cared about him. Otherwise, people would talk. You can’t have that, can you?”
A few people skirted around them, eyeing the two like they were dangerous animals. They practically were.
“Natsuo-”
“No. You don’t get to say anything. Go away, and leave the people who actually cared about him to mourn. Sneak out the back if you have to, so the news won’t know and sully your precious reputation.”
For one terrible moment, Hawks thought that Endeavor was going to hit Natsuo. He tensed, prepared to move, but then Endeavor gave a jerk of his head and stormed off.
Natsuo sagged, all signs of fury gone. He caught sight of Hawks and Fuyumi and a sheepish look came over his face. He hurried over to them.
“I’m sorry, Fuyumi.”
“Was that really necessary?”
“Yes. I can’t stand the idea of that asshole coming in here after-” Natsuo paused. His eyes darted back and forth between Hawks and Fuyumi. He leaned in and whispered, “I think he had something to do with it.”
Fuyumi gasped. “Natsuo! You can’t mean that. Sure, Father wasn’t a- a good father, and he and Touya didn’t get along, but he isn’t a murderer. They had a fight and Touya ran off.”
“Is that what we’re calling it? A ‘fight’? He could barely walk after one of their ‘fights’, let alone run away.”
Hawks’ head was swimming. All of those fractures... It wasn’t possible. “Are you sure?”
“Hawks! Don’t believe it. He has a bad relationship with our father, and he’s grieving. He doesn’t mean it.”
“I can’t be sure, but...” Natsuo looked down at the floor. He looked back up at Hawks with determination in his eyes. “None of us actually saw him that night. We only have Father’s word of what happened, and Touya didn’t take any of his belongings with him.”
Fuyumi shook her head. “Natsuo, please don’t. He probably just left for a walk to calm down-”
“Then why didn’t Father call the police when he didn’t come home? Why didn’t he look for him? Organize a search? If nothing else, he’s responsible for that.”
Fuyumi looked away. She sighed. “Can we drop this, please? Mother and Shouto will be here soon, and I don’t want them to hear.”
Natsuo pressed his lips into a thin line, but nodded. Hawks murmured his assent, already half lost in his thoughts.
Hawks couldn’t sleep again that night. Thoughts of the healed fractures on Touya’s bones, Endeavor’s brash behavior, and Natsuo’s accusations churned sluggishly in his head. The commission had taken over the case and ruled it confidential, much to the police’s fury. Not even Hawks had high enough clearance to view the files now. They insisted that it was their right because it concerned the number one hero’s son, and that Dabi was the killer, no more investigation necessary.
Hawks thought of Dabi’s scars. He thought of the scorch marks on Touya’s clothes. He thought of Dabi’s pure, unadulterated hatred for Endeavor.
He didn’t want to believe it.
“Are you Todoroki Touya?” Hawks asked. He didn’t use the word ‘ghost’. The thought should be preposterous, but instead it felt like merely confirming the truth.
Dabi laughed. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”
Hawks swayed. He knew it, but he had hoped-
His mouth was dry. “Who killed you?” he asked hoarsely.
Dabi grinned so widely his staples tore, and blood dripped down his face. “You already know.”
71 notes
·
View notes